Welcome to the Future of Work
Welcome to the Future of Work
Finding employment in virtual reality
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We’ve talked multiple times on MetaPortal about the advent of the metaverse and its impact on employment, including changing the very definition of work itself. With opportunities springing up all over the virtual landscape for you to exchange time for money, it’s time to take a closer look at what this new type of work actually entails. This piece is designed to serve as a guide to understanding what might catalyse the shift to new forms of work, how we can spot the beginnings of the trend and how to blaze your own trail in the world of web 3.0. First let’s set the scene.
Laying Flat
A skew in demographics across the globe will drive the coming change in our approach to work. In the west, millennials make up over 50% of the workforce and tend to want more flexibility from their employment. As a cohort however, millennials just set the precedent for what comes next, expect this trend to accelerate as Gen-Z reach working age. ‘Zoomers’ as they are known have fewer preconceptions about what constitutes a career, and are much more embedded in the digital space. Generations that grow up digitally native, but are unable or unwilling to follow their parents path of education > job > house > family > retirement, are instead looking for a balanced life that can be enjoyed at all ages. A combination of social media pressures, debt from education and stagnating wages are all weighing down on these two generations. When coupled with an increasingly desperate outlook on house ownership and raising a family, it leads to a large portion of the workforce stopping to reconsider if it's all worth it, if that’s all there is?
One of the more interesting reflections on this change in attitude comes from China of all places. There, the term Tang Ping (躺平) or ‘laying flat’ recently spread on social media, referring to the renewed focus on work/life balance and refusing to work oneself to an early grave for a corporation. It runs contrary to the 996 meme perpetuated by Jack Ma and other business leaders, where employees are expected to work 9am-9pm 6 days a week, and be grateful for the chance to do so. In China at least, this attitude is supported at the highest levels of government, with Xi Jinping previously writing that “hard work is the most beautiful virtue and the key to happiness". However, instead of adhering to the party line, young workers are instead sharing the peace of mind they experience when doing ‘just enough’ to get by.
The common theme between the two cultures is the pushback against working, or more accurately competing, tirelessly against others in your age group. No longer is it desirable to climb the corporate ladder and follow the well trodden path set out by the generations that came before. Of course some of the most successful startups in recent history, and current stock market darlings, have sprung up to take advantage of the zeitgeist. By offering the promise of being your own boss or having a side-hustle, companies like Uber and DoorDash are able to take advantage of those who choose to ‘lay flat’ or need to supplement their income with a second job. These types of organisational structures tend to benefit the end user and the executive board, but not so much the employees (in California, being classed as employees would be an improvement!). Uber even goes so far as to predicate its continued growth on some day having fleets of driverless cars;
“The driver represents the single largest expense in non-autonomous ride-sharing at 80% of the total per mile cost... By removing the driver from the equation, fully autonomous vehicles dramatically lower the cost of a ride while boosting its addressable market.”
In this example then, the business model fundamentally relies on some day getting rid of drivers, the very reason for the growth of Uber’s network.
Driving Axies, not taxis - Gabby Dizon
But there are other options. With the rise of crypto and the creation of ‘the internet of value’ it’s getting easier to have a side hustle that isn’t limited by geographical boundaries or reliant on an indifferent employer.
Play-to-earn as a business model is coming to the fore, contributing to a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) constantly comes up as a job of the future, and now artists are branching out to understand NFTs and sell digitally scarce copies of their work without intermediaries. All these paths offer ways to exchange time for money, flexibly, that trait desired by a younger workforce. And if work is defined in the Cambridge dictionary as “an activity, such as a job, that a person uses physical or mental effort to do, usually for money” then selling digital art for ETH on Rarible is work. Breeding Axies for profit is work. Contributing to a DAO and being rewarded is work.
It’s worth pausing here to consider the potential size of this new economy. We have just seen the number of unique Ethereum addresses reach over 163m. The United States for comparison has a workforce which at its peak, employed 164m people. When you factor in the increased accessibility of digital native work, Ethereum’s borderless and permissionless nature and the only access requirement being an internet connection, it becomes clear that the potential is massive. The total addressable market should be equal to that of the internet in fact, a cool 4.6 billion people as it stands today.
Digging deeper into the data, is there evidence that people are taking advantage of the trend? If we study the marketplace and breeding fees Axie Infinity is generating, it’s clear to see the insane traction that the game has achieved recently.
Player count is similarly off the charts, with 500,000 players in July, up from 350,000 the prior month. Contrary to zero-sum games however, this drives more value to the utility token $SLP and governance token $AXS, making it even more profitable to earn a living from the game. That’s before we get onto the floor price for Axie’s themselves increasing! Far from speculative activity, the rise of Axie Infinity and the value generated is real, and grounded in genuine utility. The effect on less developed nations that are able to adapt to this new paradigm is well documented, and highlights where the west might be at a disadvantage. With decades of prosperity and so much inertia behind legacy employment structures, it is harder for people to accept, much less pivot to, totally new forms of value generation. This certainly looks like the green shoots of S-curve adoption, but coming from a different geographic location than Silicon Valley for a change.
Similarly in the NFT world, after a brief cool down in line with the rest of the crypto markets in April, Opensea, the largest marketplace for NFTs, is starting to see substantial growth in volume again. This comes through the continued demand for digital art and collectibles, offering up a huge opportunity for creators willing to navigate web3 to capitalise on this trend.
Finally in the more nascent space of logging DAO related data, there are signs that contributor numbers are also on the rise. DeepDAO’s dashboard is showing 190k DAO members as of today, but it’s worth noting that this is very new data so may not be entirely accurate.
So how do you get a job in the emerging metaverse?
Spotting the opportunity
Broadly speaking there are two main categories of work available in the metaverse today,
1. Traditional employment in non-traditional environments - Decentral Games casino host, NFT artist.
2. Whole new types of work - Axie Infinity player/Illuvium/Gods Unchained player, DAO contributor.
You might notice that with the second category there isn’t a central authority or individual that determines the value of your work. Instead, the value arises from social consensus where a community finds utility in a token, or decides communally what adds value and therefore should be rewarded.
In May, we wrote that “We believe that economic growth as the primary measure of value is becoming outdated. With public blockchains, we can define other forms of value, and with token-based economies, we can unlock previously dormant resources to facilitate greater value creation. This will change the very definition of work, and we believe it will happen in the metaverse.” The second category fits nicely into this narrative.
Informally, I find this ‘new type of work’ can be identified through a simple test where you explain to your parents how you earn money in this environment. If they understand, it’s probably a traditional setup mirrored in the digital world (number 1), but if it blows their minds, you’re probably working at the forefront of human organisation and helping to redefine work itself! It’s the latter that feels scariest, but also offers the greatest upside.
Making an impact
In either scenario, the best way to make an impact is to do. This isn’t an environment where you wait for your boss to tell you what to do, or the direction is set much higher up by a CEO. You have to spot an opportunity, apply your skill set and deliver something impactful. Worse case it falls flat and you learn, but with the sheer number of DAOs and the growth of the crypto space overall, most projects are crying out for contributions. Cryptocurrencyjobs is a good place to start, Gitcoin are currently looking for a Shitposter and paying $80k for the role. The same applies to NFT games like Axie or Gods Unchained. Perhaps your skill lies in spotting new battle strategies and you’ve always been an avid RPG gamer? The tools are there, and so is the opportunity, this time around though you can monetise that skill.
Remember in the world of web3 it’s output > credentials. No-one knows if you went to Harvard much less cares to check, and how could they tell anyway when your profile picture is a Bored Ape? The most important thing you can do is give up on external validation sources and get stuck in. DAOs like Index Coop and NFT20 explicitly reward contributions based on impact for example; they are looking for self-starters not desk jockeys.
Proof of work
How to document all these contributions? The beauty of blockchains is their open nature allows for anyone to investigate what has taken place on-chain. Forget the LinkedIn profile, what’s your Degen Score? How many RabbitHole quests have you completed? Can you link to improvement proposals and GitHub commits?
All these provable activities help build out your web3 CV and evidence your understanding of the varying aspects of crypto. When it comes to interview time, well that’s different too. The trend we’ve seen so far is that DAOs tend to hire from within their community, so you can consider your prior months of effort as a probation period. Having a track record of engaging on the forum, helping new users in the Discord and generally representing the DAO on Twitter all go a long way to building credibility, and smoothing a transition into something full-time.
If after reading the above you feel ready to get stuck in, here is a quick breakdown of the tools you’ll need and their soon to be defunct equivalent:
LinkedIn -> Discourse Forums (specific to the DAO you’re interested in): AAVE, Index Coop
Slack -> Discord
CVdoctor -> Degen Score, Github
Education Certificates -> Web3 Wallet: Metamask
Night courses -> Rabbithole
Health Insurance -> Opolis
Risky business
This wouldn’t be crypto without a disclaimer stating none of the above is financial advice. There are some very real risks to being this early, but not all are necessarily that obvious. Firstly, swapping your real world job for a chance to earn magic internet money isn’t a decision to be taken lightly, despite many high flyers and recent graduates doing exactly that. The level of flexibility offered by these new forms of work make them perfect ‘side hustles’ to begin with and that can be the best way to get started. Find the time around a normal day job to begin contributing, experience the volatility of the native governance tokens and you can start to decide if it’s right for you. Apply for a crypto internship even (yes, these exist). Anything to take risk off the table at the start and ease your way into the future of work.
A second, more interesting risk emerges from the Metaverse itself - the arrival of virtual influencers. These avatars are sometimes animated, sometimes community run, but always exist outside of meatspace. This is a very specific risk because it mainly affects those looking to create digital art or run crypto related social media channels. It’s highly likely that we will see the proliferation of lil’ Miquela and Imma type accounts appearing in adverts and livestreams, as a much cheaper (and easier to work with?) solution for brands seeking awareness.
To combat this, we need to take a step back and consider what the human value add to a task is, and will it carry a premium? We have already seen combinations of human art with generative NFTs in the Solos project. Alethea goes a step further by offering up intelligent NFTs (iNFTs) that use machine learning, generative 3D models and NFT technology to create unique, autonomous avatars. Soon you won’t just be competing with other humans to add value, but an army of ever-improving digital creations. The upside is the rise of dInfluencers will create a whole new economy of jobs to create and maintain them, so let’s not bow down to our digital overlords just yet.
In Conclusion
With an ageing population that lived through decades of prosperity beginning to retire, an increasingly younger and more disillusioned workforce picking up the mantle, and now the rise of web3 enabling a self-sovereign internet of value, conditions are ripe for the future of work to take shape. Far from laying flat, younger generations can dive headlong into the metaverse and be part of creating an entirely new economy.
Governments around the world will need to wake up to these changes as whole swathes of the population don’t return to work in the traditional format. Where do DAO contributors show up in national employment figures? This will likely be seen in the developing nations first, where prolific mobile phone use makes the transition to digital work much easier. The size of this opportunity is fundamentally global and the trend will take shape quickly, bear in mind when reviewing the figures that Axie Infinity hasn’t reached India or Africa yet.
With the majority of these games, apps and NFTs being deployed onto Ethereum or Ethereum scaling solutions, the barrier to entry should become lower and lower. As education and awareness of the crypto world beyond a particular game or application spreads, expect to see people staying on crypto rails and becoming Bankless. Far from the hype of 2017, it feels as though Crypto as an asset class is on the cusp of developing multiple virtuous cycles that keep value flowing within the system, rather than desperately trying to flee it. You have a chance to be part of that.
Right now a number of tools exist, or are being built to take advantage of this trend. While it’s prudent to be aware of the risks, getting involved now means being ridiculously early. Consider what your skills are, where you can add value and which path looks most interesting, then jump in. A whole metaverse of opportunity awaits.